terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
kelber at mindspring.com
kelber at mindspring.com
Mon Jan 26 15:13:12 CST 2015
The image of young Gottfried entombed within the Rocket seems to me Pynchon's most powerful expression of the complicated interface between humans and technology - humans create technology, fall victim to technology, and are inextricably part of it, willingly or otherwise.
Laura
-----Original Message-----
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen
Sent: Jan 26, 2015 9:58 AM
To: Monte Davis , pynchon -l
Cc: David Ewers
Subject: Re: terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
So the current digitalization of world-society could be stopped by
individual and/or organizational agency?!
No fucking way.
In a recent publication - Irrnisfuge. Heideggers An-archie
(Berlin 2014) - Peter Trawny pointed out that Heidegger's
'depowering' (Entmächtigung) of the modern subject is the main
reason why his thoughts are contradicted with such an amount of
aggression.
We like to think of ourselves as sovereign subjects with a huge
spectrum of possibilities which enables us to change the run of
(macro-societal) things. For the enlightenment of the 18th century
this was the newest hottest shit. Kant's "Ausgang des Menschen aus
seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit" and all that. But even
back then - and Mason & Dixon is not exactly the book
to convince me of the opposite - this was largely an illusion. In
the 21st century it is nothing but ideology. The Counterforce can
give interviews to the Wall Street Journal, ---- it cannot defy
the logic of Raketen-Stadt.
On 26.01.2015 14:36, Monte Davis wrote:
KFL> "The
Rocket as such would have come anyway... People...are welcome
as customers, but the Ge-stell would work without them too"
Will the
Dichter explain which elf or wraith or World-Spirit or deep
carbon-rich stratum would have built Kummersdorf and then
Peenemunde, and then the Soviet and US factories? would have
allocated resources to airframes and turbines and
bodenplattes, managed their assembly and integration, trucked
the rockets to launch sites? would have talked the
legislatures, voters, Party committees into spending money on
those activities rather than others?
It's hard to
understand why Pynchon clutters M&D with Penns and
Calverts, Royal Societies and land-jobbers, Londoners and
Geordies and Philadelphians. After all, the Visto would surely
have cut itself even if no European had ever set foot in North
America, right? Axes swing themselves, chains stretch
themselves, Obs write and reduce themselves, marker stones
embed themselves, yes?
As a reader,
I do feel and respond to -- really, I do -- the poetic and
rhetorical power of such abstraction, personification, and
reification. But when I close the book, there I am as a person
on the cold hill side of history, and I look around and see
only people, doing what people do... and that includes
hallucinating Great Capitalized Motrices. On occasion, those
hallucinations are great literature. Much more often, they're
cop-outs.
On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 7:11 AM, Kai
Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
On 26.01.2015 00:52, David Ewers wrote:
Yes, that's the stuff!
I sort of get the impression that the presence of these Forces or Things in the Saddle (good stuff!) does some purposeful magic to Pynchon's perspective; it broadens the lens beyond the human in a way that makes us humans look sort of ridiculous, clownish in even our darkest aspirations, but more lovable and easy to root for for it.
It reminds me a bit of the relationship between the Greeks and their gods, except these these Forces aren't humanized (so treated more reverently in a way, fewer presumptions regarding behavior beyond the human?) and there's any rarely clear, direct communication between Us and Them (by the way, ever notice that there's no remembered conversation between Cherrycoke and either Mason or Dixon in Cherrycoke's account, even though they often found themselves in similar straits?). So unlike the Greek gods these Things are just beyond us (to varying degrees, maybe? they do seem to have their allies...) but like a couple of those gods they do appear to involve themselves directly - if only dimly viewed through our lenses - in some big arc of human technological novelty. Or something...
Pynchon is the poet ("Dichter") of the Ge-stell.
> Heidegger applied the concept of Gestell to his
exposition of the essence of technology. He concluded that
technology is fundamentally enframing. As such, the
essence of technology is Gestell. Indeed, "Gestell,
literally 'framing', is an all-encompassing view of
technology, not as a means to an end, but rather a mode of
human existence".
The point that Heidegger was attempting to convey with
Gestell was that all that has come to presence in the
world has been enframed. Thus what is revealed in the
world, what has shown itself as itself (the truth of
itself) required first an enframing, literally a way to
exist in the world, to be able to be seen and
understood. Concerning the essence of technology and how
we see things in our technological age, the world has
been framed as the "standing-reserve." Heidegger writes,
Enframing means the gathering together of that
setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him
forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as
standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of
revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern
technology and which is itself nothing technological.
Furthermore, Heidegger uses the word in a way that is
uncommon by giving Gestell an active role. In ordinary
usage the word would signify simply a display apparatus
of some sort, like a book rack, or picture frame; but
for Heidegger, Gestell is literally a challenging forth,
or performative "gathering together", for the
purpose of revealing or presentation. <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestell
In the current age science is a part of technology, not
vice versa as the myth of modernity has it.
Now, at this point - Winke, Winke! - usually someone comes
along quoting a famous sentence from Gravity's Rainbow:
"Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if
it'll make you feel less responsible--but it puts you in
with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping
the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless
hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all
to be where they are—" (p. 521). Impressive quote, nicht
wahr? But when you look at it in context you will realize
that it is not the author's perspective which is given
words here. The sentence before goes like this: "Yes but
Technology only responds (how often this argument has been
iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction,
among the younger Schwarzkommando especially), "All very
well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do
you think we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific
somebody with a name and a penis hadn't wanted to chuck a
ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block full of
civilians?" First, do note the the argument is ascribed to
younger members of the Schwarzkommando "especially". Then
the argument is being "iterated, dogged and humorless as a
Gaussian reduction." Neither youth nor humorless
repetition are indicators of truth in Pynchon. And of
course we would have the Rocket without "some specific
somebody with a name and a penis" who wants to "blow up a
block full of civilians." How could anyone deny this?
Modern societal machination ("Machenschaft" in Heidegger's
sense) goes back to the mathematization of science and
the corresponding closing of the modern mind. "Monads
don't have windows," as Leibniz says. Method is ruling
more and more, and by the 1950s Heidegger saw even
(academic) philosophy replaced by cybernetics. The
sentence quoted ad nauseam here to argue against a
'structural' reading of technology in Pynchon is not
directed towards the reader, it is - do note the address
"brother"! - part of the inner debate of the Herero
Schwarzkommando and formulated from a specific character
perspective, not from the author's general one. And
although there are reasons for the members of the
Schwarkommando, the younger ones especially, not to
subscribe to a 'structural' view of technology but to
develop instead a rhetoric of self-empowerment which makes
themselves feel more male and "responsible," it is not at
all something which would make us understand technology
better. Neither von Braun nor Hitler were responsible for
the Rocket as such. The Rocket as such would have come
anyway. The logic of enframing, manifesting itself also in
the unfolding economization of all things on earth, leaves
out nobody and nothing. And that's a leitmotif in Pynchon.
The author's own perspective in context of the passage in
question is most definitely closer to the one formulated
in the paragraph before: "It means this War was never
political at all, the politics was all theater, all just
to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it was being
dictated instead by the needs of technology ... by a
conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by
something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying,
'Money be dammed, the very life of [insert name of Nation]
is at stake,' but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly
here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh
more, more ... The real crises were crises of
allocation and priority, not among firms----it was only
staged to look that way---but among the different
Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their
needs which are only understood only by the ruling elite
..." People with names and penises who wanna blow up a
block full with civilians are of course welcome as
customers, but the Ge-stell would work without them too.
With Bleeding Edge, Pynchon takes his Songs of the
Ge-stell to the digital dimension.
(On the War Machinery do also see chapter 12 of A
Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, who
are, mockingly or not, mentioned by Pynchon in Vineland,
p. 97. Since the English edition was available since 1986
(chapter) bzw. 1988 (whole book), Pynchon perhaps had a
look at it while writing parts of Mason & Dixon.
That his interest in French philosophy hasn't stopped
becomes obvious by the appearance of Lacan in Bleeding
Edge. Whether you like this or not.)
On Jan 25, 2015, at 2:31 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
To your point:
p. 39 "the emprise of Forces invisible yet possessing great Weight and
Speed, which contend in some Phantom realm......"
As in that build-up of 'forces' in AtD before WW1, TRP sees war as a
Force of its own. As Emerson was to write with broader meaning a
century later, "Things are in the Saddle and ride Mankind".
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 4:36 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
Guernica didn't occur to me directly when I was reading, but now that you
mention it I did get a 'Guernica Feeling'.
Rambling of lessons more abstract...(or just difficult for me to effectively
put into words):
Again, to me this scene was filled with suggestions that the Affaire des
Frégates was exactly that: an affair between two ships, with their
respective personalities, proclivities, reputations etc. as prime movers...
and the humans almost as components of rigging and guns. It's as if we
humans create the conditions (the machinery, and all its philosophical
underpinnings...), but things have ways of taking on lives of their own (as
in taking on board, while we build the ways?).
And the Invisible Gamesters, are they (all, or all still) human? Or am I
just being paranoid?
On Jan 25, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
just a couple more "associations' when one reads a genius.
p.38. "the Ship's hoarse Shrieking, a great sea-animal in pain, the textures
of its Cries nearly those of the human Voice when under great Stress"
'hoarse Shrieking of The SEAHORSE...i cannot be the only one who sees
the screaming Guernica horse here, amiright? ....
A--and if this is War--it is--and it brings the nearness of black
Panic and bowel
evacuation, we get a hint of shattered nerves, which had lots of names down
to
post-traumatic stress disorder. sometimes, way back, it was called, linked
to
Homesickness (in the West) as soldiers got hit far from home and
wanted to go back.
That Equator ceremony started as a marker for being for the first time
so far from home.
On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
Dissolution, Noise, and Fear. Are these part of "the Lessons more abstract"
the Rev 'went on to draw' from his Encounter with 'absolute black panic'.
A Sum-up of the horrors of war
as presented in fiction from, O, the Iliad (where it is also a Glory)
and War & Peace
and All Quiet on the Western Front and al the others I don't know and
probably in a battle scene or
three in O'Brian's Aubrey--Maturin series.
I think science traveling by war machine, in your phrase, science an
Enlightenment good, is a key Pynchon resonance/theme.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 8:01 PM, David Ewers <dsewers at comcast.net> wrote:
The other side of the coin (...this one works with the idea of the Line as
another of Pynchon's War/Science-wrought projections "[o]f forces less
visible...", I think...):
That the question isn't why the l'Grand eventually split so much as why a
scientific expedition would get so bloody in the literal first place.
Maybe, just as Science was understood to travel by war machine, so it was
considered to be part of the war machinery itself (even Mason and Dixon,
running messages...). After all, does it make sense for a wartime military
to replace its guns with scientific equipment, if science isn't seen as a
weapon? Advantageous peace might be a military objective, but I can't
imagine even Enlightenment generals working to replace the art of warfare
with the art of surveying.
The laissez-passer reminds me: I was reading a bit about the HMS Seahorse
that sailed during the 1760s. It was damaged during a 1778 battle with a
French squadron led by the le Brillant (maybe why the Seahorse bucked at the
HMS Brilliant in M-&D-?). The French squadron included the frigate Sartine.
Two weeks after the battle the Seahorse captured Sartine, which subsequently
became the HMS Sartine.
Anyway, it got me thinking maybe the laissez-passer for scientists was for
the same reasons we gave Nazi scientists jobs instead of death sentences:
not because of how peaceful they are as people, but rather how useful they
are as weapons, should they be captured.
BTW, a young Horatio Nelson was assigned as midshipman to this very HMS
Seahorse, through the influence of his uncle, Maurice Suckling. Suppose
Maurice is related to Darby?
On Jan 23, 2015, at 3:11 PM, Monte Davis wrote:
Maybe a bit too science-specific -- before "total war" came into fashion,
many kinds of cross-border social and cultural links continued while the
kings and princes marched around. (Passports didn't become routine until
WWI, remember.) But the Enlightenment definitely boosted, as the Ranaissance
had, the idea of scholarship -- and then science -- as above the fray.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
Clearly, it seems to me, Pynchon is "saying' that if combat, war,
killing was turned aside because science.....then he is, at least,
showing science as a hopeful thing out of the Enlightenment here in
the late 1700s. England and France were the Western World
at war so...................
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 4:58 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
Here's an account of a French Transit of Venus expedition that set sail
shortly before the Seahorse expedition. Lots of similarities, in terms of
being undergunned and over-cargoed:
By and large, things did not go as well for the French expeditions.
Alexandre-Gui Pingre left Paris on November 17, 1760, for his
destination of the island of Rodrigues, viewing his forthcoming voyage
with foreboding. This despite another remarkable novelty of the times.
Although Britain and France were locked in bitter battle, the Academie
Royale des Sciences had appealed directly to British authorities to
grant
Pingre a laissez-passer, a letter instructing all British naval and
military
personnel "not to molest his person or Effects upon any account, but to
suffer him to proceed without delay or Interruption." This was indeed
granted, although since sea battles tended to exchange gunfire first and
civilities later, if at all, Pingre's misgivings were not misplaced.
The transit party sailed on the Comte d'Argenson, a warship that found
itself with less than half its normal complement of guns in order to
extend its cargo capacity to that needed for the expedition. (There had
been a heated dockside argument over the baggage, Pingre arguing
furiously that seven or eight hundred pounds was not too much for an
astronomer!) To the horror of all on board, a group of five British
warships was sighted only one day out from port. To allow full play of
its remaining guns, the ship's crew tore down the temporary cabins that
had been erected for Pingre's companions, the latter and their
belongings being flung unceremoniously into Pingre's cabin for the
time being. Fortunately, though, a combination of suitable winds, the
long winter night, and the captain's skills allowed the Comte to slip
away unmolested, and everyone settled down to the remaining four
months of their voyage.
ttp://www.mdlpp.org/pdf/library/SeahorseMdTransitofVenus.pdf (posted
previously)
-----Original Message-----
From: Monte Davis
Subject: Re: terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way
to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456
A bell rang when I read this Pynchon passage in 1997: I was sure I'd
read somewhere, long before, about Napoleon himself using the French
captain's words, or very similar phrasing, w/r/t letting some expedition
pass, returning some naturalist's specimen collection that had been
captured, or the like. But I've never tracked it down, nor did it turn up in
the 1997 or 2001 group readings here. (Nor do I know of any answer to your
question about how the French captain would have known of M&D's presence,
other than Pynchonian conspiracism about the the higher levels of Them, e.g.
IG Farben, Shell, GE et al. carrying on despite the distraction of WWII.)
FWIW: In 1813, when Great Britain was at war with Napoleon's France,
English scientist Humphry Davy traveled freely on the Continent and in Paris
collected a prize and medal funded by Napoleon for the best work on
galvanism. (While not common, such interactions were not unknown in other
fields of scholarship as well as science.) Davy remarked to an associate:
"But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are
not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should
rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the
asperities of national hostility." Quoted in Gavin de Beer, The Sciences
Were Never at War (1960).
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:10 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
Which brings up the question of why the l'Grand turned away. Was it
really, as Smith (filtered through Cherrycoke) reported, "France is not at
war with the sciences?" If so, how did they eventually figure out,
mid-attack, that this was a scientific expedition? Was Smith able to get the
letters of passage over to the other captain? Kind of seems there should
have been some identifying marker - a sail with a sun and two crossed
telescopes instead of the skull and bones? - to prevent attacks before they
started.
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